The Strategic Role of Telecom Providers Across the AI Value Chain 2026

2.4 Strategic plays for the national sovereign champion to activate resilience As sovereignty requirements expand from data residency to full-stack control, governments and regulated sectors need in-country compute, platforms, models and assurance. The national sovereign champion pathway positions telcos as trusted operators at the intersection of connectivity and compliance – harnessing national network and data centre footprints to deliver sovereign AI capabilities. Long-term sovereign infrastructure contracts, sovereign platform/model services and trust/assurance layers are key to capturing value. This pathway is activated through four strategic plays: sovereign AI infrastructure, sovereign AI platform and model services, mission-driven sovereign use cases and AI security and safety. Sovereign AI infrastructure Sovereign AI infrastructure enables telcos to deliver AI-ready colocation and GPUaaS campuses that guarantee full data residency within state jurisdictions. These facilities offer high-density power and cooling for LLM training, carrier-neutral low-latency connectivity across metro, edge footprints and even the many shelters in towers, and full compliance within national jurisdictions. Momentum is building in the EU as consortia bid to build AI gigafactories: massive compute facilities to advance digital sovereignty, national competitiveness and local innovation. One example is OpCore, which is developing over-100MW (megawatt) French and pan-European data centres42 positioned as neutral hubs for “made-in- Europe” AI ecosystems.Customer demand for sovereign AI is accelerating as organizations face stricter requirements around data-locality, compliance and security. In Europe, 62%43 of organizations now seek sovereign solutions, particularly in banking, public services and utilities. Global spending on sovereign AI infrastructure is projected to reach $1.5 trillion44 by 2028, with $145 billion45 in Europe alone, growing nearly 30% annually and straining regional data centre capacity. Governments worldwide are prioritizing sovereign compute footprints, with at least 18 telcos46 participating in state- funded AI infrastructure programmes. Demand spans the public sector (health, defence, critical infrastructure), regulated industries (finance, energy, pharmaceuticals) and latency-sensitive workloads that require in-country AI training and inference. Consumer demand is largely indirect, enabled through locally hosted AI applications and services. Incumbent CSPs have a right to play, with their existing fibre backbones, edge points-of-presence (PoPs), site deployment and spectrum placing them at the intersection of compute, connectivity and compliance. Iliad, for example, harnesses its 62 million-subscriber network and eight-country fibre footprint to channel traffic into OpCore’s sovereign AI sites. Monetization strategies blend long-term hyperscale colocation contracts (15–20 years) with GPUaaS capacity for enterprise bursts, layered with premiums for sovereignty and low-carbon power purchase agreements (PPAs). CASE STUDY 8 T-Systems, SAP and Nvidia build Europe’s industrial AI cloud T-Systems is partnering with Nvidia in a $1 billion initiative to renovate data centres and launch an industrial AI cloud in Germany using up to 10,000 Nvidia Blackwell chips, projected to boost AI compute by 50%. Positioned as part of a “sovereign Germany stack”, the platform combines its infrastructure, SAP’s enterprise platform and NVIDIA GPUs to keep industrial AI workloads in-country and ensure they’re backed by renewable energy and German data protection law. Global spending on sovereign AI infrastructure is projected to reach $1.5 trillion by 2028. The Strategic Role of Telecom Providers across the AI Value Chain 16